chown clears suid bit!

[Brian K. White]

Hi,
I am pre-apologizing as I'm about to sound like yet another ingrateful user. 
:) sorry!

I just spent litterally all day tracking down a bizzarre inexplicable 
brokenness trying to get a new box up & running.
Scripts that have worked for years on many OS's (sco osr, sco unixware, 
solaris, linux, freebsd, hpux...) suddenly didn't work on a new SuSE 10 box.
(namely, the setperms script that ships with filePro (commrcial database and 
4gl) on several unices and hasn't changed significantly since '92, and no 
changes since '00)

Skipping all the blind alleys I chased down, the end result was that chown 
now clears the suid bit from files it acts upon.

As the man page doesn't mention this, and it's certainly new behaviour, and 
certainly deviant from every other unix,
I submit that it should not do this.
Thanks

Brian K. White  --  address@hidden  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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